“Happy Ending”… Hip surfaces, but downright clichéd at heart

Happy Ending, which is directed by Raj Nidimoru and Krishna D.K., begins with a scene in a cinema hall where a surprise guest star declares her love for Yudi (Saif Ali Khan). A startled Yudi’s response is to spill Coke on his shirt and stuff his face with popcorn, so he doesn’t have to say anything back – but when she insists, he cannot lie. She’s outraged. She accuses him of having no depth, but he’s content to coast in shallow waters. “Jitna dikh raha hai utna hi hai,” he shrugs. And I thought to myself: “Isn’t Saif too old to be playing these roles, and hasn’t he played them a hundred times before?” What was charming in Salaam Namaste has curdled into self-parody – he seems stuck in the same place, the actor’s equivalent of Rishi Kapoor jogging on a giant LP. The Salaam Namaste déjà vu is exacerbated by the presence of Preity Zinta, who’s rather winning as Divya, one of Yudi’s exes, now married and a mother of three. We are reminded of her pregnancy in Salaam Namaste and it looks right that she’s with children now, while he’s still brandishing his bachelor status like a sword against Time.

As it turns out, the film is in on this… joke, if you want to call it that. In fact, Yudi’s friend Montoo (Ranvir Shorey, salvaging a thankless role with a few zingy one-liners) says as much. “Main yahaan baap banne wala hoon aur tum abhi tak break-up patch-up khel rahe ho.” Yudi himself knows he’s not getting any younger. When his alter ego Yogi (also Saif, this time as a slob with a beard and a paunch and some kind of junk food always at hand) reminds him that he is indeed old, Yudi mutters that he is at least young at heart. What we appear to be watching, then, is some kind of meta-comedy about the Saif Ali Khan persona, and the suspicion is confirmed when a film star named Armaan (an underutilised Govinda, who’s fun to watch nevertheless) makes an appearance. The meta-ness is doubled because Armaan is a former single-screen star who now wants to court the multiplex audience (much like Govinda did in last week’s Kill/Dil), while Saif is playing safe again, courting the multiplex audience after a couple of disastrous attempts (Bullett Raja, Humshakals) to cross over to the single screens. And like Saif, Yudi (who’s a writer) is at the crossroads of his career. His last success was a few years ago, and now his fame is on the ebb.

You think this is great terrain to be explored by these directors who aren’t exactly known for playing it safe, but, bafflingly, they choose to make a rom-com. The Armaan angle is sidelined – he wants Yudi to write a movie for him, and he hands him a bunch of DVDs. (I suppose this counts as an indictment of Bollywood… or something.) Instead, we settle on Aanchal Reddy (Ileana D’Cruz; interesting surname that, in a Bollywood movie), who will become Yudi’s latest object of interest. To the directors’ credit, they at least try to fool around with the rules of a rom-com, which is presented not as the main story but as the story within the story that frames the movie. Yudi’s transformation to screenwriter means that the various episodes between Yudi and Aanchal become “scenes” in the screenplay, archly advertised as “Boy Meets Girl,” “Dhinchak Song,” “Airportwala Scene,” and so on.

There’s also an attempt to debunk the opposites-attract cliché that is the very oxygen of rom-coms. Vishakha (Kalki Koechlin, playing yet another of Yudi’s girlfriends) tells him, “Apne aap se bahut pyar karte ho.” (This film has the habit of putting its thesis points into the mouths of its characters.) She’s right, of course, and it only follows that someone this solipsistic would fall for someone exactly like him, which is what Aanchal turns out to be. She’s a writer too. She’s content to coast in shallow waters as well, mocking “true love” and all its accoutrements (though she certainly doesn’t mind making a living by exploiting those who believe in these things; she’s a romance novelist). And she gives Yudi the lines he gave the girls he brushed off, lines like “We can still be friends.”

The rom-com that results, however, is hardly as edgy as all of this suggests. (It might have been, had it ended at the point where Aanchal walks away, after giving Yudi that line about being friends.) Happy Ending is too long, and too content to settle for easy gags, which aren’t even all that funny. (One of them involves the classic hitchhiking scenario, on a Pacific Coast highway. Aanchal takes her shirt off and no one stops. Yudi takes his shirt off and a hillbilly-like man stops. I suppose this counts as “subversion”… or something.) And the film makes it too easy for Yudi to get away from his other relationships. The women around him are either shrews (like Montoo’s wife) or stalkerish nutcases (like Vishakha), and both of them are used to peddle a “joke” about pregnancy being the most horrifying thing that a man can face. Strangely, for a film that revels in its hipness, it’s the traditional rom-com scenes that work best – like the long drive with Hindi songs playing on the radio, or the proposal at the end. Surely directors this smart should know that you can’t mock a genre and embrace it at the same time.

I found Kalki and Ranvir better than anyone else in the film. As for Govinda, I don’t understand what kind of comeback he wishes to make doing bit roles in films like Kill/Dil and this one.

I will remember Happy Ending for being the first Hindi film to feature a literary agent. Usually, author characters in Hindi films go straight to publishers. And they also win awards. Like how Amitabh Bachchan’s Baghban – written in a café, à la JK Rowling’s Harry Potter – was nominated for the “international Booker award”!

One thing I couldn’t digest, though. Ileana’s novel, a fluffy love story, being published in a hardcover the size of Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies.

I was the only one, it seems, who liked it as much as I have. I walked out, went around hyping the movie for everybody calling it an Indian Woody Allen film. Reviews screamed Saif has become older for these manchild, urban flirty roles and I was like “Are you crazy? Can’t you see he kills it in these roles every time??” I really enjoyed it. Yes, the developing-the-luw-between-Reddy-and-Yudi parts kind of dragged because the leads, are lets face it, unlikable and unsympathetic when it comes to the audience wanting to see them fall in love; hence the romance was the weakest part, I felt.

Thank God, it was only there for like fifteen minutes. But still it’s forgivable. On a strictly visceral level, I really enjoyed the film. Happy Ending is definitely not perfect but the best parts of it are so charming and funny, I can’t just trash it for people. My friends were showing me two star reviews and I was like Wait for Brangan’s and now no one’s here to bat for me :'((

Also it has a few plot points in common with Go Goa Gone. Off the top of my head in both films, a lead character jumps from an high altitude to escape getting caught that can f**k up his life.

Also in both films, one person has booked flight tickets but someone else coaxes him(Anand Tiwari in GGG)/her(Reddy here) to go on a car ride, the trip goes haywire but ultimately it’s a life-changing experience, character development wise.

hahaha really? I thought it was quite GRCA approved. I mean I did expect a meta-romcom but yeah would have liked exploring the Govinda angle more. And yes, no film has celebrated the 90s Bwood music (and the whole Govinda as representation of single screenmultiplex transitioning actor itself a 90s to 00s thing) like this one thus far.

He keeps mentioning in the movie that he wrote a book five and a half years back. And five and a half weeks after proposing to Kalki, they get the break up. What’s the relevance of the number, I wonder.

@prey There were also other .5’s in the film (5.5 years later, 8.5 girlfriends later) – I think that has to do with pushing the point that Saif leaves everything halfway and nothing in his life reaches an ending.

BR – Ignorance truly is bliss 🙂 This is a classic case of what you so memorably defined as ‘English movies for those who don’t watch Engish movies” – just amend ‘movies’ to TV series’. I guess no one here has watched the iconic source material this film has shameless ripped off – the Showtime series Californication featuring the one and only David Duchovny as hedonist writer Hank Moody. Raj, DK (and Saif) are hugely hugely deluded if they think that Saif is India’s answer to Hank Moody. (Let’s not even start with the Nicholas Cage/Adaptation type alter-ego Yogi here).

Just watch any ten-second clip on YouTube to get a sense of the flawless way Duchovny portrays Moody’s life philosophy of “Zen and the art of who gives a fuck”. Plus he looks hot in ways that actually make you believe that women would throw themselves at him, no matter how big of an asshole he is, unlike Saif Ali Khan with his unfortunate girlie-man demeanor and permanent bad hair day.

Is it just inspired and not lifted, by any chance ? Heck no – Crazy, stalking girlfriend – check. Venice Beach locales – check. Basic premise of bestselling author past his prime looking to revitalize his career – check. Whacky celebrity looking to hire said author for a project – check. Said author rejected by girlfriend when he actually tries to commit – check. The gingerly resolution – check. I could go on.

Harsh much, you say? I’ve read this blog long enough to know that the inevitable discussion of “but we need to judge a piece of art, however derivative,in and of itself and not be colored by judgement’ will come up. But there is a difference in Haider-izing a piece of art and simply proceeding to treat the Indian film audience as an undiscerning street mutt ready to lap up anything thrown in its’ direction.

Maybe this in fact is the real meta joke Raj and DK play on us – making a film on copycat writing while doing so themselves.

I completely agree with Sandhya. Even when I first saw the trailer I immediately knew it was a rip off of Californication. If they had stuck to the Govinda angle and actually made the movie all about that, it still would have been a rip off of Californication. The route they eventually took of making it a typical romcom is also a plot point from Californication.

If only they had remained truer to the original source and had actually given Saif’s character a teenage daughter. Now that would have made the movie ‘different’ from a Bollywood perspective – albeit still a rip off.